Happy New Year: I Zapped Your Link!
You can tell who greeted the New Year in last night and who did not. Some blogs are silent today as bloggers recover from a night of revelry. Others had the presence of mind to “drip” their article by writing it while their sobriety was still with them.
As for me, I hit the pillow around 10:30 on New Year’s Eve and woke up as the firework’s were being set off in my neighborhood. I’ve been online since 7:30 a.m. updating the main HTML pages for this site, checking to make sure that all nine blogs I manage have flipped over for 2008, and updating links.
Not bad for a guy who will reach the Big 5-Oh in 2008, eh?
Speaking of links, I may have zapped your link today. Back in December 2006, I worked feverishly to exchange links with lots of folks with the arrangement that some would be permanent while others would expire at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 2007. Not to waste a moment, I logged on this morning and tossed a bunch of links and then checked the remaining links to this blog to see if “reciprocity” was still in effect.
What I learned today was ugly.
Most of my writing friends are still blogging away and our linking agreements are in place. I understand that Georganna Hancock will be moving links to a special page in the near future (I may do the same here) while two other writing blogs have since gone dark.
The ugly part was all of the links I made with Digital Point (DP) members — only two of what was probably two dozen links still remained. So, if you think your link is still good here you better check your site as I could not find any sign that The Article Writer is still receiving link juice from you.
Regardless, my linking strategies have changed since my DP link-a-thon. Effective immediately, I will only allow other writers to have a link on this site under Reciprocity, but I am grandfathering in a few other links as the benefit to both parties outweighs everything else.
If you are a writer with a blog and are interested in exchanging links with me, then please drop me a note and we’ll take it from there. For everyone else, I have five other blogs where linking is allowed, therefore we might be able to work something out elsewhere. Again, feel free to contact me.
That’s enough work for today. I’m taking advantage of the legal holiday and my advanced age to get some rest.
Have a Happy and Productive 2008!
Tags: Digital Point, Georganna Hancock, link exchange, paid links, SEO, unpaid links
Linking Strategies | Matthew C. Keegan, 1 Jan 08
By Georganna Hancock, January 1, 2008 @ 3:35 pm
The loss of PageRank from Google has turned my blog-world view upside down. Links are bad. Nothing’s good. Traffic’s up, advertiser’s gone. A Writer’s Edge has twice as many backlinks as The Article Writer and zero PageRank. Go figure. I AM wondering why I am still blogging.
*sulks*
And a Happy New Year to you, too!
By Matt, January 2, 2008 @ 9:11 am
Georganna, you’ve had it rough in 2007! I hope that you can keep blogging in 2008 and regain your lost position.
Making sense of what Google is up to isn’t likely to be something any of us will be able to figure out.
By Tinkertim, January 2, 2008 @ 11:34 am
I’ve more or less given up on hunting links. I write a tech / zen blog just like three million other people. Google has been kind to me, however I don’t rely on them.
My blog remains (as always) a hobby. I don’t serve ads, I don’t join junk ‘share’ networks and I don’t use my page rank to sell links. I post things before Wired and similar sites do, then I enjoy 3 or 4 days of great traffic. The second Wired regurgitates what I wrote, I get buried on page 4 of Google’s search results.
So, I’m committing blogger suicide, I’m banning Googlebot from my blog. Stumbleupon and others send me more (quality) traffic that turns into visitors, commentators and registered subscribers.
The benefits: Less SPAM, Spammers pick blogs via Google search results for whatever keywords they want to hit.
The cons: None, Google only sends me junk traffic, anyway.
Screw em, just write and write well and you’ll do well. Google is ONE search engine, the more we depict them as a giant, the more people will ‘blog for Google’. The more that people ‘blog for Google’, the more of a cesspool the Internet becomes.
We now hesitate to update our blogroll, for fear that Google may penalize us for linking to an off topic site. At what point does this end? Screw em.
By Matt, January 2, 2008 @ 5:32 pm
Tinkertim,
I hear you. Google isn’t the only search engine out there and bending the knee to their every whim is ridiculous.
I’m not sure that I’d block Googlebot, but I can understand you’re wanting to attract better traffic than what you’ve been getting.
Too many people blog simply to monetize their sites. With the money factor removed or reduced, maybe that’ll clean up the internet better than anything else out there.
Best wishes to you for 2008!
Matt
By Lucille Zimmerman, January 7, 2008 @ 10:41 pm
I’m brand new to reading and writing a blog. I seriously thought blogs were for people who had nothing better to do. Now I realized blogs can be a powerful tool. I just came across your blog today via Jennifer at CopyBlogger. I am having a good time figuring this all out – I’m not technical at all. But each day I learn a little something new. I don’t know if my site would benefit from advertisements or not….
By Matt, January 8, 2008 @ 7:09 am
Lucille, thank you for stopping by. LOL — it can seem that some some bloggers have nothing better to do! I like blogging because it gives me an easy way to post what I write and to maintain contact with my readership.
Ads are fine as long as they are intrusive. If you can make some money off of your blog, then why not?
Best wishes to you!
By INDERt, February 2, 2008 @ 10:32 am
I love to read your blog also. But according to your complaints about this kind of viewing search item, I always figured out how to include this form in your weblog as communicately folks had it done. So, thanks for your blog post. However, I love it to read your blog.
By Jason Pearson, February 25, 2008 @ 9:37 pm
came across your blog today.
Glad to see you were actively bringing in the New Year!
Keep posting and I’ll be back to see what you are posting!